Does Paint Color Affect Your Home’s Temperature?

Many people know that dark colors absorb heat and light while lighter colors reflect heat. If you’re considering painting the interior or exterior of your home, you may be wondering if these same principles apply. Does paint color affect your home’s temperature? Here’s what you need to know.

Exterior Paint Color and Temperature

If the exterior of your home is painted a darker color, you can expect it to absorb more heat. Meanwhile, a lighter exterior paint color will reflect heat, which will keep the home cooler. However, the extent to which paint color alone impacts the temperature inside your home has not been measured. There are many other factors that contribute to how much heat your home absorbs, including the color of the roof, the materials use in the siding and roof, and the level of insulation in these areas. All of these factors may increase or decrease how much your home’s temperature is affected.

If you’re looking for ways to naturally keep your home’s temperature cooler, opting for a lighter exterior paint color is a great place to start. Meanwhile, if you’d like to absorb more heat from outside, a darker paint color will better suit your needs. However, you shouldn’t expect this to have a significant and noticeable impact on your home, so if you have your heart set on a specific color, it’s best to choose what you really want over what may be just a slight impact on your home environment. There are plenty of other ways to impact your home’s temperature outside of the exterior paint color you choose.

Interior Paint Color and Temperature

So, what about inside your home? While the colors you choose for your interior walls are not exposed to much of the sun’s heat, can they still make a difference? The answer is also yes. When you turn lights on inside your home, these generate heat as well. When more light is needed, more heat is also created. Choosing an interior paint color accordingly can also impact the temperature of your home, albeit indirectly. Lighter colors will reflect more light, helping to keep the room bright while requiring fewer light sources. Meanwhile, darker colors will absorb the light, so you may need to turn on more lights to achieve the same level of brightness. This creates more heat as well, which can impact your home’s temperature. Again, the impact of the increased or decreased heat may be fairly small overall, depending on other factors like how insulated your home is, whether you have energy-efficient windows in place, and so on.

Update the Paint Color of Your Home

Are you ready to update the paint color inside or outside of your home? Whether or not your home’s temperature is a deciding factor for choosing your paint color, you can rely on the professionals at Southern Painting to help you out. We offer comprehensive interior and exterior painting services and can help you find the paint colors that are just right for your home. Contact us today to learn more.